An American tenor, a Puccini specialist, arrives at the Met

“He was kind of like my self-discovery composer,” Tetelman said. When he started learning Puccini roles, he said, he felt that “this is the music I want to build my voice with, this is the music I want to discover my voice with.

“I think Puccini gives you a lot of opportunities to fail,” he added, “to reinvent and change who you are, because Puccini is verismo,” referring to the earthy and emotional late Romantic style in which Puccini wrote. never the same from one performance to the next.”

When we spoke, Tetelman had just returned from Palermo, Sicily, where he sang the third of the five Pinkertons he is booked for this season and next.

“You love to hate that man. It’s amazing!” Tetelman said of the character, a US naval officer who marries and abandons a young geisha. He points out how Puccini vividly evokes Pinkerton’s sarcasm, arrogance and manipulative behavior while keeping his role so lushly beautiful as ‘a perfect characterization’. After the Met he will sing it L.A. Opera in the fall and then in April 2025 at Baden-Baden with the Berliner Philharmoniker. After that, he plans to “put the role aside for a while.”

Although Puccini is a mainstay at opera houses around the world, Tetelman has taken on a lot of work this year, the centenary of the composer’s death. (Tetelman also pays tribute to him on his most recently released album: “The Great Puccini.”) There is, however, one part that Tetelman says he will not fully cover yet: Calaf, the mysterious prince in Puccini’s unfinished last opera, ‘Turandot’. It’s a heroic, punishing role that requires incredible stamina. It also includes ‘Nessun Dorma’, perhaps the most famous tenor aria in existence.

“I really want to be at the peak of form and ability to really pull it off,” he explained, adding that he had received and rejected offers to sing it.